Before One of Americaâs Most Horrific Crimes Was Solved, Someone Else Was Publicly Blamed. The Damage Went on for Years.
Soon after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, many chose the wrong man to blame. His story has been forgotten. It shouldnât be.
APRIL 19, 2026 Â Â Â |Â Â Â 5:40 AM | Josh Levin
On the morning of April 19, 1995, Imad Enchassi drove to work at a shopping mall in Oklahoma City. Enchassi was the general manager of a buffet restaurant. As soon as he got in, he counted the money from the night before, then got ready to go to the bank and make a deposit.
Before he left, Enchassi looked out the window to make sure it was safe to take all that cash outside. Just then, he heard and felt a huge explosion. At first, he thought someone might be shooting at him, to try to steal the money. But when he opened the door and saw the sky filling with smoke, he knew it was a bombâspecifically, a car bomb.
Enchassi had grown up in Lebanon, in a family of Palestinian refugees. As a child, he lived through a brutal civil war and survived a civilian massacre in his refugee camp. âWhen we were little, we played âname the caliber of this bomb,â â he told me. âIt sounds odd, but when you grow up in a war-torn zone, those are your games that you play as a kid.â
With the worst memories of his childhood flashing through his mind, Enchassi got behind the wheel of his pickup truckâhe still had to go to the bank to make that deposit. On the radio, he heard early reports that the side of the federal building in downtown Oklahoma City had been blown away, that debris was everywhere, and that dozens of people were missing. It also seemed like the attack might not be over. The local news reported that a second bomb had been found, and then a third, and that both of them were larger than the first.
The truth was, there was just one bomb, and it had exploded in a truck parked outside of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. But on the morning of April 19, no one knew muchâabout who had attacked Oklahoma City, or how, or why. And Enchassi, whoâd survived years of warfare in Lebanon, was scared. âIt was just dĂ©jĂ vu,â he said. âThis is what I ran away from.â
Like Enchassi, Ahmad was in his early 30s and had grown up in the Middle East as a Palestinian refugee. On April 19, he was headed off to Jordan to see his family. He was traveling alone; his wife, Martina, was staying behind with their two young daughters. Ahmad was in a hurry that morning, hunting around for his socks before he kissed the kids goodbye. A relative drove him to the airport, and he got there in time to make his 10:40 a.m. connection to Chicago. That was the first leg on an itinerary that would take him to Rome and then his final destination, Amman.
Ahmadâs plane landed at OâHare in the early afternoon. As he walked into the terminal, he didnât know anything about what had happened back at home. What he did see, as he found the gate for his flight to Rome, was a chyron on a faraway TV: âBreaking News: Oklahoma.â
His first thought was that there mightâve been an earthquake, and he worried that something mightâve happened to his wife and kids. But Ahmad didnât get the chance to call them. âA minute or two later, it was the Customs or the Immigration,â he told me. âThey politely came and just told me, just, âWould you come with us?â â
That simple question was only the beginning of an unrelenting nightmare. Ahmad would be detained and interrogated. The media would connect his name to one of the most horrific crimes in American history. It would take him days to fully understand what had happened in Oklahoma, and what was happening to him. Now, more than three decades later, those days are a terrifying testament to what can follow a rush to judgment in Americaâand how stereotypes can obscure the real dangers hiding in plain sight.
When Ahmad got pulled aside at Chicagoâs OâHare Airport, heâd been living in the United States for 13 years. He first came to America on a student visa. His first stop in 1982 was Long Island, where he stayed with a friendâs uncle. When that man brought him to a fast-food restaurant and ordered hamburgers, Ahmad remembered, âI told him, âI donât eat pork.â And then ⊠they explained to me whatâs ham and whatâs hamburger.â
Ahmad wasnât in New York for long. A Jordanian company had gotten him admitted to a junior college in a tiny town in Oklahoma. At school, he made friends with a small group of Muslim students. They hung out, studied, and prayed together. They also aroused the suspicion of their white neighbors. One night, he was preparing for a calculus test when he heard a knock on the door. When he opened it, âaround 15, 20 guys push the door in my face and start beating me, beating me, beating me.â
After that attack, the collegeâs dean of international students advised Ahmad that heâd be safer somewhere else. He ended up at a school outside Oklahoma City. It was there that he fell in love with his new home state, and started wearing boots and cowboy hats. Ahmadstudied computer science, and in 1990 he became a U.S. citizen. Ahmad, his wife, and his two daughters eventually settled in uptown Oklahoma City, four miles northwest of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. âYou could make it in America,â he told me. âYou could have a good job, and you can afford to save money and buy your own house.â
After all that, Ahmad didnât get rattled easily. So on April 19, 1995, when Customs and Immigration officials pulled him aside at the airport and started asking him questions, he felt confused but not scared. He suspected that they thought he might be carrying a phony passport, but he was happy to clear up any confusion.
Customs and Immigration were done with him after a couple of hours, but Ahmad wasnât free to go. A team of FBI agents came in with a new batch of questions. They wanted to know about the Arab and Muslim communities in Oklahoma, and whether he prayed at a mosque. He said that he did go to the mosque every Friday, and that he prayed and fasted and raised his children to be good Muslims. He told me that at this point, he wasnât worried at all. âFor me, I see it as an opportunity to explain to those people who may be ignorant,â he said. âMaybe they donât know enough about the Arab culture or the Muslim culture.â
The agents kept going, wanting to know about the vehicles he owned and how he paid for his plane ticket. They also asked Ahmad if heâd ever been a part of any group that discussed violent activity against the United States. âI, of course, told them Iâd never been part of any organization whatsoever,â he said. When the agents asked specifically what he knew about the destruction of the federal office building in Oklahoma City, he said that he didnât know anything. All heâd seen on that airport TV was that something bad had happened in Oklahoma.
Ahmad was in custody for five or six hours. He told me that when it was all over, the agents said they were sorry for keeping him. Since heâd missed his connection to Rome, they rebooked him on a flight to London, so he could get to Jordan at roughly the same time as heâd originally planned.
When he got to Heathrow Airport, though, he learned that heâd arrived too late to catch his next flight and there wouldnât be another one available for two more days. On his way out of the airport, Ahmad handed his documents to an immigration officer. âAnd when he looked at my name, he asked me to wait,â he said. âA few minutes later, he came with I donât remember how many guys with guns.â
These guys with guns told Ahmad to âcome with usââhis second âcome with usâ in less than a day. But this one felt different. In London, he was taken to a small room, where he saw his photograph printed out on a piece of paper. Then the officersâhe didnât know which agency they were fromâasked him to take off all his clothes. He told them that disrobing was a violation of his religious beliefs, but they insisted: He needed to take off everything, even his underwear.
âThis is a total humiliation. You know, you become very angry from the inside,â he told me. âWeâre not in the jungle here. Youâre treating me just like an animal now.â
The strip search didnât turn up anything. Ahmad was allowed to put his clothes back on. And then he sat and waited in a locked room for what felt like forever, with no one telling him anything. Finally, after five hours, Ahmad got handcuffed and told he was under arrest. He was paraded through Heathrow Airport with his wrists in shackles, and escorted onto a plane by two FBI agents. Those agents sat behind him for the whole flight. He could feel every passenger in the cabin staring at him.
Ahmad likely knew less about the bombing in Oklahoma City than anyone on that plane. The people detaining him werenât sharing any information, and he still hadnât heard a news report. What he didnât realize was that millions of people around the world had been hearing all about him.
Ibrahim Ahmad and his friend Imad Enchassi were part of a small Muslim community in Oklahoma City. They worshipped in a two-bedroom apartment while the group raised money to build a more permanent mosqueâa spiritual home that would deepen their roots in their hometown.
On April 19, Enchassi felt shaken by the bomb that had just exploded in Oklahoma City, and by the memories it dredged up of his childhood in Lebanon. But that morning, he didnât have time to dwell on the attack. The buffet restaurant he managed opened at 11 a.m., less than two hours after the bombing.
One of his customers that day was a man Enchassi considered a friend, someone whoâd been to his house and sat at his dinner table. But on April 19, this man wasnât feeling friendly. He looked Enchassi in the eye and said, loudly, âYou people better have not done this.â
After that interaction, Enchassi called his district manager and got permission to take the rest of the day off. Back at home, he stayed glued to the radio and TV. What he heard on the news wasnât any more comforting than what heâd gone through at work. On the CBS Evening News, Connie Chung said that the attack âwas similar to the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and similar to attacks on U.S. forces in Beirut in the 1980s.â Those supposed connections, she said, had âinvestigators looking for a possible link to Middle East terrorists right here in the American Midwest.â
Chung was right: Federal investigators werelooking for a link to Middle Eastern terrorism. Earlier that year, intelligence agencies had heard chatter that foreign extremists were planning a strike on the U.S. But early media reports after the bombing suggested something different: that Oklahoma itself was a hotbed of radical Islam. A former Oklahoma congressman named Dave McCurdy said that Muslim fundamentalists had been convening in the area. His source, he said, was a 1994 PBS documentary called Jihad in America.
That anxiety and anger werenât just directed toward Ibrahim Ahmad and his family. Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko wrote that Middle Easterners were likely to blame for the bombing. He wrote, âPresident Clinton says we should be cautious about placing blame or taking action. OK. But when the time comes for punishment, it wouldnât be an eye for eye. Thatâs just a swap. We should take both eyes, ears, nose, the entire anatomy.â Radio host Bob Grant told a Muslim caller heâd like to put him up against a wall with the killers and âexecute you with them.â
The Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded 222 incidents of harassment and violence against Muslims in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. Someone threw a fake bomb into the playground of a Muslim day care center in Dallas. A mosque in Stillwater, Oklahoma, got shot at two days in a row. And on April 20 in Oklahoma City, a group of assailants terrorized a pregnant Iraqi refugee, breaking windows at her home and shouting anti-Muslim insults. She had a miscarriage the next day.
Ibrahim Ahmadâs family found their way to safety, with the help of Imad Enchassi. They had no idea what might happen to their husband and father, and when this was all going to end.
As Enchassi waited to learn his friendâs fate, a thought kept nagging at himâan impulse he felt ashamed of, but found impossible to ignore.
âWhen they said they found bomb-making material in his luggage, they were very convincing,â he told me. âThe media has been so perceivably thorough in their investigation that I really suspected my own friend.â
Ibrahim Ahmadâs return flight touched down at Dulles Airport around 8 p.m. on April 20. For the third time in a little more than a day, heâd be placed inside a closed-off room. Before the FBI interrogated him, they asked him to sign a piece of paper. It said that he was waiving his right to an attorney, and that he hadnât been coerced.
Ahmad agreed to sign, so long as he was allowed to write down everything that had been done to him in Chicago and London. When he finished that account, he got driven to another location. There, he wasgiven permission to make onephone call. He asked to be connected to his sister in Jordan, so he could tell her heâd decided to reschedule his visit.
On that call, Ahmad was making up a story to protect his family from worry. He didnât know that his sister and everyone else in Jordan had heard about him on the news. Besides, Ahmadâs sister told him later that his voice had betrayed his fear. âYou try to be calm as much as you can, but there are some things that you cannot help,â he told me.
After Ahmad got off the phone, the interrogation began. This time, all the questions were about his three pieces of checked luggage. Ahmadâsbags had gone on without him to Rome, one of the cities on his original itinerary. News outlets around the world reported what Italian officials had found inside his bags: electronics, tools, and tubes of silicone. According to media reports, those were possible bomb-making materials.
I asked Ahmad to tell me what he remembered about those bags, and what heâd stuffed inside them. âTypical person coming from Third World and come to a Western country,â he said. âYou buy, like, the maximum, because everything you buy in the United States is really, really good quality.â
âAmong the items he packed were two or three wireless phones, multiple car stereos, and a bunch of Craftsman tools. (âA lifetime warranty on those things,â he told me.) The tubes of silicone, he said, were for his father, who was having problems with a leaky sink. âHe keeps buying cheap stuff because thatâs the thing available in Jordan,â Ahmad told me. âSo he said, âSince you are coming, why donât you get me that good silicone from the United States?â â
It wasnât just the silicone that media outlets had branded suspicious and sinister. There was also that New York Times report about him carrying pictures of military weapons. Ahmad said that those were photos from a trip to see his brother-in-law, who was training at a U.S. military base. âThis was in Aberdeen, Maryland. I went to visit him. And so they had, I think, tanks and rockets, maybe from World War II,â he said. âAnd those pictures happened to [be] in the album and the album was in the luggage.â
All these things inside Ahmadâs luggage were likely the main reason he got strip-searched in London and sent back to the U.S. in handcuffs. Itâs what the media seized on, in reports that made it sound like he could be a terrorist. Itâs also what caused Enchassi to suspect that his friend might have something to do with the bombing.
Ahmad explained everything to the federal agents: the photographs, the electronics, the tools, and the stuff heâd bought to try and solve his fatherâs plumbing problems. âThey asked me, âDo you know anything about silicone?â I said, âThe only thing about silicone, itâs good to use around the sink. Thatâs the only thing I know.â â
The agents questioning Ahmad believed he was telling the truthâthat these were not bomb-making materials. Everything else that he said checked out, too. He was not, as CBS had suggested, âseen outside the federal buildingâ âshortly before the blast.â He was just a family man from Oklahoma City whoâd been on his way to visit relatives in the Middle East.
Ahmad said the agents told him, âYou are innocent.â They bought him a ticket to go back home to Oklahoma City, and told him heâd be traveling under a pseudonym because his name had been leaked to the media. When he asked where that leak had come from, they didnât give him an answer.
This time, Ahmadâs itinerary was D.C. to Nashville to Oklahoma City. In the Nashville airport, he found himself alongside a group of firemen heading to Oklahoma to help with the rescue. He overheard them talking about a Middle Eastern man whoâd been brought back from London for questioning in the U.S. âBut they didnât knowâthis is the person!â he told me. âI am listening to a story about myself.â
It was there, in Nashville, 48 hours after the bombing, that he first began to piece together what had happened in Oklahoma. A bomb had destroyed a federal building. Scores of people were killed. The nation was in mourning.
Ahmad finally made it back to Oklahoma City on Friday, April 21. When he got to his house, his wife wasnât there, but her brother was. âHe told me she went into hiding. I said, âHiding from what?â â
Martinaâs brother told Ahmad that sheâd been interrogated by the FBI, that their address had been broadcast on the news, and that Martina had taken their girls to a safe place. Ahmadâs wife and daughters had stayed with Enchassi, then moved on to the house of another friend. Around midnight, Ahmad went there to reunite with his family.
âWhen they opened the door and she saw me, she really dropped, like unconscious,â he said. âI think what she went through is much harder than what I went through. For her the uncertainty was the biggest thing.â
Ahmadâs 5-year-old daughter couldnât stop crying, even after he returned home. She said that she didnât understand why all those angry people had been outside their house. Ahmad told her that those people had thought he was a killer, and that he didnât know why. But he told her not to worry. He said: âIâm safe now, youâre safe, and Iâve got nothing to do with all this stuff.â
Ahmad and his family finally made it back to their house early on Saturday, April 22. When he turned on the news, he learned that the real Oklahoma City bomber had been publicly identified.
Timothy McVeigh had been pulled over for a traffic violation less than an hour and a half after the bombingâjust a few minutes before Ahmadâs flight to Chicago. Police took McVeigh into custody when they found he was carrying an illegal gun. In the meantime, the FBI traced the truck used in the bombing to a rental facility in Kansas. A sketch artist made drawings of the two white men who rented it. McVeigh was hours away from potentially making bail when a lawyer recognized him from one of those sketches.
McVeigh was arrested in connection with the bombing on the afternoon of April 21. Ahmadâs release from custody became public the same day. Hisexoneration did not make big headlines. The Washington Post mentioned it in the 36th and final paragraph of its front-page story on McVeighâs arrest. âNow your story is gone. Itâs history. Your story is nothing,â Ahmad told me. âYouare completely forgotten. Nobody is talking about what happened to you and your family.â
For Imad Enchassi, it was hard to see his friendâs release and Timothy McVeighâs arrest as anything but an enormous relief. But there wasone thing that he needed to do before he got closure. After Ahmad got home, Enchassi sat his friend down and made a confession: âCouldnât look him in the eye, ashamed, looking down. I was, in a very hesitant voice, told him, you know, âThe media was very strong in condemning you, in pointing the finger towards you, that, you know, some of the people here actually, including me, thought maybe you have done it.â And I begged for his forgiveness. And he forgave me for that.â
After 9/11, Enchassi felt a calling to become an imam. He wanted to spread peace and understanding, and to promote a positive image of his faith in the media. Heâs now the senior imam of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City. Heâs given sermons on the doubts he felt about Ahmad after the Oklahoma City bombing. He tells that story as a reminder not to rush to judgment. He thinks about that lesson every time he sees his friend. âIbrahim was here a few days ago, actually,â he told me in 2021, âand I swear I could still not look him in the eye.â
The date of the Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, had special significance for McVeigh and his collaborator Terry Nichols. It was the second anniversary of an event that had helped stoke the American militia movement: the federal raid in Waco, Texas, that ended with the Branch Davidian compound burning and 76 people dead. That connection, which pointed to anti-government domestic terrorists, didnât get major media attention in the hours after the attack on Oklahoma City. The bogus connection to the Middle East did.
One of the experts whoâd touted that Middle Eastern link, former congressman Dave McCurdy, said he was sorry if anyone thought heâd jumped the gun, but he continued to insist that Islamic extremists had met in Oklahoma City. Steven Emerson, the producer of the documentary Jihad in America, said heâd done nothing wrong in declaring a possible link to Middle Eastern terrorism. âI have never referred to American Muslims as the subjects of somebody who should be investigated,â he explained. âIâve always said very precisely that militant Islamic terrorists and suspects are the ones that should be investigated.â Emerson is now the executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which calls itself âthe worldâs most comprehensive data center on radical Islamic terrorist groups.â
After McVeigh got caught, news outlets had to reckon with the choices they made in the hours after the bombing. CNN had broadcast the names of four individual Muslim men who had nothing to do with the bombing. One of them was Ibrahim Ahmad.
CNNâs executive vice president stood by the networkâs choices, saying they were ânot in the business of keeping secrets from our viewers.â CNNâs Wolf Blitzer said on the air that the network was âjust reporting what we hear from reliable sources.â His colleague Bruce Morton noted that âeverybody made a serious, good-faith effort to get this right, and the Arab Americans were right to be sensitive. Theyâve been victimized before, but this came out pretty evenly, I think.â
In 1996, on the first anniversary of the bombing, a number of journalists checked in on Ahmad. He said that his life was in shambles. An NBC reporter gave this rundown: âPart-time jobs, shunned by neighbors, counseling for him and his wife, and a family divided. He sent his daughter to Jordan to escape the attention.â Ahmad himself told ABC, âItâs changed our life forever. We donât feel we are welcome in this country anymore.â He said that heâd been having a recurring nightmare. He was in a courtroom, and a judge told him, âYou killed those people, and weâre going to hang you.â
Ahmad filed a lawsuit against the government, saying that heâd been detained because of his ethnic heritage. He eventually dropped that case, though, and in our conversations, he wanted to focus on the positive things that happened after his detention. People left flowers on his doorstep and sent his family notes of sympathy and solidarity. Heâs held onto those letters for decades, from a womenâs Bible study group, a Sunday school class, and a man who offered to paint his house for free.
Ahmad left America in 1999, to be closer to his aging parents in the Middle East. When I checked in with him recently, though, he was back living in the United States, splitting his time between Denver and Oklahoma City. He has children in both cities, and his main focus now is to make sure theyâre supported. He also wants them to be proud of who they are, and proud to be Americans.
âNobodyâs going to take that from you,â he told me. âThereâs people who donât understand, but thatâs not the majority of Americans. Donât be shy to be an Arab or to be a Muslim in this country.â